The Pandemic Will Be More Deadly This Year
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Covid-19 is going to kill more people in 2021 than it did last year. If you want to see why, look at what’s happening in India.
Cases have been surging in the country of 1.37 billion people. On Sunday alone, 261,500 new infections were recorded. That’s as bad as the U.S. during all but the worst five days of the pandemic in December and early January. Case counts are rising far more quickly, too. Average infection numbers over the past seven days have run at nearly three times the level two weeks ago, a pace of growth that the U.S. last saw in the early days of the outbreak a year ago.
The real numbers may be yet higher. The city of Bhopal used Covid-19 protocols to cremate or bury 84 people last Tuesday, according to the Hindustan Times, while declaring only five Covid deaths. The B.1.617 variant, which isn’t well understood yet, has features associated with higher infection rates and lower antibody resistance. It's turning up in more than half of viral samples taken in India.
As caseloads push medical facilities toward capacity, the health system itself is starting to crack. Vaccine stocks, hospital beds and even oxygen supplies are running short, leading to bitter arguments between the states and the federal government. In some places, the dead are being transported by truck because cities have run out of hearses. Elsewhere, crematoria have started to break down because of the sheer number of bodies being burned. The government Monday promised to open up vaccines to all people over the age of 18.
If things don’t change soon, the country will be facing 3,000 deaths a day — twice its current level, and 10 times what was being seen through most of this year — Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan, wrote last week.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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These are population adjusted. However, I would think that the healthcare infrastructure in India is going to change these numbers.
A lot.
See my other thread.
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@george-k said in The Pandemic Will Be More Deadly This Year:
The real numbers may be yet higher.
This is 100% for sure. I bet that actual numbers are probably 3-4 time higher
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@taiwan_girl said in The Pandemic Will Be More Deadly This Year:
I bet that actual numbers are probably 3-4 time higher
Russia announced on Friday it would impose a 10-day non-working period at the beginning of May to stem the virus spread, a departure from the government’s hands-off approach in recent months.
Russia has been hard-hit by Covid-19, with the Rosstat state statistics agency recording more than 224,000 virus-related deaths – more than double the 107,501 that health officials reported as of Friday.
If correct, the Rosstat toll would mean Russia has the third-highest number of coronavirus deaths in the world, after the United States and Brazil.
